When you’re talking about the average security officer, body armour has not been so readily available as it has been for police officers. That said, the demand is now very much there, and the status quo is changing.
At Lorica Research we receive many enquiries on the subject, and it’s clear that there’s a good deal of myth and misunderstanding about body armour for security personnel that needs to be dispelled before security industry end users – like the police community before them – can become informed buyers.
A central truth about the wearing of body armour of any kind is that it doesn’t guarantee protection from serious or fatal injury. Rather, it’s concerned with minimising risk.
Another myth doing the rounds is that there always has to be compromise with coverage of the body – a ‘trade-off’ for the sake of ‘wearability’. One cannot realistically obtain protection from head to toe. This may seem obvious, but we often have long debates with clients about, for example, how far up under the arm the armour should extend, or whether top-of-the-shoulder protection is needed.
At the end of the day, you have to draw the line at what is realistic and enables sufficient mobility and comfort. There’s no point at all in providing armour that the security officer then removes because it’s too uncomfortable.
Threat risk assessment
If there is a perceived risk to your officers, is it a low or high risk – and what, exactly, is the type of risk? Such questions must begin any security manager’s study into the need for his guarding team to wear body armour.
Is there a potential risk from stabbings, shootings – or both? At what position are those risks on a scale from low to high? Are they, for example, at the lower end (from common handguns and ‘birdshot’ cartridges, or maybe pocket knives)? Or are they at the higher end, from powerful longer-barrelled guns such as carbines and sub-machine guns? In terms of the risk to security personnel, is the officer a desk-bound guard at little or no risk (perhaps in a control room watching CCTV monitors), or is he or she a foot patrol guard, or a Cash-in-Transit officer ‘out in the open’? Assessing the risk at too low a level will result in insufficient protection. Assessing it at too high a level will inevitably lead to less comfortable body armour. As a consequence, that armour might well remain in the guard’s locker and never be used on duty. Of course, that would defeat the objective entirely.
Standards mean everything
Security managers considering body armour for their guarding team should never buy products that haven’t been certified to at least one of the recognised standards (see ‘Body armour and current legislation: a guide for security managers’).
On a simple level, bullets should not be able to penetrate the armour. Another important consideration concerns the measure of ‘energy’ that passes through the vest into the body of the wearer immediately behind the point of impact of the arrested bullet. This can result in severe blunt injury (or ‘blunt trauma’).
The effectiveness of armour in respect of its blunt trauma reduction capability is measured by shooting a ‘test bullet’ against a soft clay block and then measuring the depth of the dent in the clay. The shallower the dent, of course, the better the armour. While high blunt trauma may not necessarily cause death, a vest that keeps this type of injury to a minimum is safer to wear. At the end of the day, it’s better to carry a few extra grams in weight for effective blunt trauma protection.
Levels of protection
Not all body armour vests offer the same degree of protection. A ‘stab-resistant’ vest that defeats knives – and that’s certified to a knife-resistant standard – might not deflect attacks from spikes and needles.
Those vests made from wire mesh and chain mail most certainly will not do the job. Meantime, a bullet-resistant vest certified to the appropriate standards might not defeat any stabbing weapon. In fact, at Lorica we know of none that will – screwdrivers excepted – without the addition of some other material. Managers must also be aware that bullet-resistant vests are sometimes sold as also being stab-resistant when in truth they’re anything but – or, more to the point, they’re not sufficiently stab-resistant to be certified to any stab armour standards.
Another threat that many security officers will face is that from injury by fragments (‘shrapnel’) from explosive devices. The traditional military ‘flak jacket’ is designed to defeat that type of threat. Shrapnel injuries may be a rarity for security staff, but they’re worth planning for – particularly for guarding teams at corporate hqs in major city centres.
There are two other important considerations of which the purchaser of body armour for security personnel must be aware. The first is that, in order to give it an overall thinner feel and appearance, some manufacturers make their armour physically thinner around the border edges. Buyers and wearers alike should be aware that this reduces the area of full protection.
Similarly, in armour packs that are an assembly of separate panels – such as a ballistic armour panel, stab armour panel and a blunt trauma panel – one or more of the panels may be quite a bit smaller in area than the others. The same consequence will result.
Second, should the armour be overt or covert? This is perhaps the most subjective of all decisions concerned with the wearing of body armour.
Most police officers now wear their armour overtly (ie in clear view) – the one-time feeling that the sight of overt armour may actually incite aggression (by giving the wearer the appearance of being aggressive) appears to have subsided. For uniformed private security guards, overt armour is the best type.
Digby Dyke is a defence technology specialist at Lorica Research (www.lorica-research.com)
